Live: Tens of thousands lose power amid outages across Northland, Far North
Live: Tens of thousands lose power amid outages across Northland, Far North
Northpower says most of its 65,000 customers have been affected by outages across nearly the entire region after a tower fell near Kumeū.
I've never seen an entire tower fall over like that, that's kinda terrifying.
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I’ve never seen an entire tower fall over like that, that’s kinda terrifying.
Me neither! I wonder what caused it. Looks like maybe some bolts came off the feet? Since normally there would be huge concrete pads that they are connected to.
There are, I guess, 4 tower feet, they are very big structures. So my guess is that the "workers" were told remove the leg bolts, sand-blast the foot, then renew the bolts.
"Now guys, I’m off for a smoko, have it done before I’m back". "OK guv".
Instead of doing it one foot at a time, the obvious method, the "workers" then rush off, "Hey Mick, you do leg one, Jim you do leg 2, Manuel you do leg 3, Franco you do leg 4". "OK let’s go".
In 10 minutes all the bolts are removed, the wind picks up, the lateral force on the cables increases and bang, down she goes.
Haha who put the project manager in charge 😆
Occam’s Razor strikes again.
Reading the updated story, it definitely sounds like poor procedures.
Apparently there's some rumours going around that they were doing some maintenance work on the pole when it happened. Don't know how true it is though.
Rusted to hell, would be my guess.
One update said there was no corrosion damage. That was my guess, too. The mystery continues! Maybe eroding soil?
You'd expect to see the concrete base come out if that happened. It does sound more like poor maintenance than anything else.
Yeah, that's a good guess. I presume they do regular inspections, so it would be interesting to know how this got missed.
Funnily enough, I just watched a YouTube video of yet another bridge collapse in the states, if it's anything like that case, the corrosion and decay would have been duly noted on successive inspections, and duly ignored by the powers that be.
I wonder if we will ever know, or because they are a SOE they may fall outside the power of anyone to investigate them.
That's not a thing at all. SOEs face investigations like any other company. Kiwibank for example is getting prosecuted at the moment by the commerce commission for fair trading act breaches
Sorry I should have been more careful with my words. The government does investigations into itself all the time, and because of the Official Information Act they results generally get made public, even if they was no issue found.
But for a company, the rules are different. If there is some legal action to be taken, then that happens whether it's SOE or company, but if it wasn't negligent then we don't have any path to get info from the internal investigation.
Ah right that's fair enough, SOEs definitely are a blindspot from an OIA perspective. I thought you meant in comparison to a private company, which would be the same if not worse.
I think in this case a combination of the huge public interest and the heavily regulated environment transpower operates under the causes will come out. But I guess we'll see
Yeah my original comment did a terrible job of communicating my point 😆
Kiwirail definitely didn't get out of being investigated.
Yeah sorry, poor wording. What I meant was companies only get investigated when they are negligent or breaking a law, and only if they get charged do we get information about it.
Government departments will do internal investigations and then the results are accessible under the Official Information Act, regardless of outcome, so we tend to get more info if it's government.
But on thinking about it, Transpower are probably keen to give people an explanation if it was some freak accident to protect their reputation, so we may find out anyway.